


Leaves a Hole

by aibari



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Series, coping with loss, of people expectations the things you believed in
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 01:59:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2049084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aibari/pseuds/aibari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy Dyer wakes up alone in a hospital room. Elsewhere, Kieren can't make his hand stop shaking, Jem sees a therapist, and Philip Wilson realises that something important is missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaves a Hole

**Author's Note:**

> Belated happy birthday, vikinged!

_one_

**A Grave Disturbance**

Amy opens her eyes to a hospital room. Her head is spinning and the walls are white enough to hurt, and for a moment she is absolutely rock sure that she dreamed up the entire Rising just to get away from the whole cancer thing. She throws an arm up over her face to shield her eyes, and the motion rips the skin clean off her hand. The pain sings through her, sharp and hot like the shrill of a boiling kettle. She clamps her teeth together, thinking _shit shit shit_ , and squints down at her hand to assess the damage.

There’s no damage.

“Well,” Amy says, because the sound of her own voice is the only familiar thing around, and it makes her feel a teensy bit better, “that’s weird.”

It’s _really_ weird. And there are … tubes. There’s a mass of them coiling around the bed she’s lying in, around her. Some of them poke out from her other arm, and … two lie in her lap, the needle ends stained red and shining wetly in the fluorescent lights. She must have accidentally ripped them out when she moved.

Amy looks away. Her stomach twists itself into a balloon animal of dread.

She can’t remember how she got here. The room is nearly empty, save for the bed she’s lying in, the tubes, and a small bedside table. There is a glass of water on the table, and – her heart does a little skip-jump – someone’s put a stuffed tiger next to it. Amy bites her lip. It’s not that she’d _really_ thought she’d dreamed it all up, her death and the Rising and Kieren and Simon and Phil and everything, but seeing the tiger there still makes it a little bit easier to breathe. Amy leans up close to it, looking it straight in its glassy tiger eyes. She holds the stare.

“Well, hello there, Tiger,” she says, mock-flirty. It sounds so ridiculous she has to laugh. She picks the tiger off the table. It smells like detergent and its fur is stained with who knows what, but it doesn’t matter. She isn’t about to start giving a shit about appearances, not now. Not ever. The tiger is soft and small in her arms, and she remembers getting it from Phil – he’d won it! For her! No-one’s ever won anything for her before – but she doesn’t really remember what happened afterwards. They went to the graveyard, and …

(Maxine Martin lifts her hand, lifts the scissors she is holding and _plunges_ )

… she can’t remember what happened next. It’s all blurry. Amy relaxes her grip on the tiger (when did she tighten her fingers?) and sighs.

“I guess it’s just you and me,” she murmurs. It’s fine. She has a lot of experience being alone in hospitals. It’s fine.

The door opens, sharply enough to slam into the wall, revealing a tall, pale man standing in the doorway. It happens so suddenly that Amy nearly bites down on her tongue.

“You’re awake,” the man says. His voice sounds friendly enough, but he’s moving towards her in a quick staccato way that puts her teeth on edge. “That’s good.”

“What happened?” Amy asks. The words come out hard and accusatory. Good. “Why am I here?”

“You were facing certain death.” The man smiles, not unkindly. Even his eyes are pale – in the harsh light of the room, they look almost transparent. “We saved your life.”

Amy makes herself keep looking at him.

(driving the scissors down over and over and over)

“I’m a … PDS-sufferer,” she says, slowly and deliberately, so there’s no way he can miss the sarcasm, “technically I don’t have a life to save.”

(her heart is beating)

The man is still smiling. It makes her skin crawl. She needs to get out.

“Quite right,” he says. He picks up her hand. His hand is warm and dry. The feeling of it on her skin shocks the breath out of her. He continues, “Or you would be, if you were still suffering from PDS.”

That doesn’t make any sense.

“What?” she says, but her voice is coming from somewhere far away.

“I’m going to put the cannulas back in,” the man says, twisting her arm around. “Please keep calm.”

(her heart is beating)

It’s getting hard to breathe

(her heart is beating and Phil is carrying her)

The man slides the needles in under her skin, slowly, first one and then the other

(her heart is beating and there is blood everywhere and Phil is carrying her and Kieren is holding her hand)

He’s saying something, but she can’t make out the words, and everything is going weird and blurry at the edges, like she’s viewing everything through a sheet of jelly

(it stops)

Everything goes black.

-

Kieren’s hand starts to shake in the middle of dinner. They’re having roast lamb, and he is quartering a potato when his fork starts clattering against the plate. He grips it tighter, tight enough for his nails to start digging into his palms, but it doesn’t help. His mum looks at him. She looks worried, but he could be reading into it.

“You okay, love?” she asks. Kieren puts down the cutlery and gives her a tight smile.

“Yeah,” he says, a bit too brightly. He puts his hand on his knee. It twitches against his jeans. “Yeah, no, I’m fine.”

It’s probably a good thing that Jem went out to the city today, because if she’d been here she would be looking at him like he’d told them he was starting to think Victus had the right idea. As it is, his mum gives him a small, sympathetic smile, and Kieren doesn’t think she believes him, but she doesn’t call him on it. His dad says something about Using His Words. Kieren changes the subject to his dad’s newest blu-ray haul. His hand is still shaking when his mum starts clearing off the table.

He excuses himself, mumbling an excuse on his way to the bathroom, and when he gets there, he locks the door behind him. It’s a good thing he’s a ( _rotterundeadredeemed_ ) PDS-sufferer, or his arm would probably be killing him by now. Who would have thought being a zombie would give you health benefits?

He sits down on the edge of the tub and shakes his hand to get the tremors out. It doesn’t work. He tries not to think too hard about what it means, what it _might_ mean, about what might happen if this thing spreads, if it gets worse. _When_ it gets worse. It’s already worse than it was _last week_. Kieren bites at the inside of his cheek. Not too hard – the last thing he wants is to bite off a chunk of himself by accident – but the pressure of teeth against flesh is reassuring. It’s solid and real and _controlled_.

He gives his reflection a wry grin, but he’s not really feeling it. The other day he’d found a flyer in the kitchen trashcan, crumpled up hard so that the first few letters of “RABIDICATION” were the only things that were showing. He had fished it out, feeling sick, and smoothed it out on the kitchen table. “DANGER COMES TO ROARTON” it read, “ONE MISSED DOSE AND THIS HAPPENS”. And there, under a grainy, black and white picture of the kid at Jem’s school who’d taken blue oblivion, was a list of symptoms: Involuntary trembling; nosebleeds; memory loss. He had stared at it for a while and then crumpled it back up again, thrown it back into the trash. He hasn’t missed any doses. This shouldn’t be happening. If this is what it feels like, rabidication, if the neurotriptyline is beginning to stop working, if he’s working up an immunity to it … He doesn’t want to go back. He doesn’t want to go back. The thought claws its way up his throat, slick and sharp-clawed, he doesn’t want to go back to being … he _can’t_.

He shuts his eyes and leans forward, resting his forehead against the bathroom mirror. _I can’t_.

Something drips into the sink.

For a moment he almost thinks he’s crying. He blinks his eyes open, and yeah, everything is a bit blurry, but the stuff in the sink definitely isn’t tears. It’s got the wrong colour for that, for one. It’s the colour of an ink spill. Kieren breathes in, shakily, and slowly raises his eyes to the mirror.

He’s got a nosebleed.

-

Jem gets on the train and regrets it immediately. The minute the doors close behind her it feels like all the air is sucked out of the car, like she’s in a shuttle in outer space and the hull has sprung a sudden and catastrophic leak. She has to lean against the wall to steady herself, and when the train starts to move again, she nearly falls flat on her face into the aisle.

Public transport is the worst. Jem sits down in a window seat, wiping her clammy hands on the armrests. She should have gotten drunk first. She’s already regretting not getting drunk first. At least the car is empty; at least she won’t have to keep scanning people’s faces throughout the entire trip. That’s good. That’s something. Jem digs through her bag and fishes out her headphones, puts her music on so loud it wraps around her and the beat hums through her teeth. She sits as still as she can manage. Keeps her breathing even.

She can’t stop thinking about exits. Can’t stop thinking about the _lack of_ exits, which is worse. The train has emergency brakes and emergency hammers, but they don’t do much to stop her from thinking about how she’s stuck in a closed environment hurtling through the countryside at over a hundred miles an hour. If something happens, if there’s ever a ro – if someone goes rabid, the only way to get out alive is going to be fighting through it. Jem keeps her breathing even. She can’t stop thinking about Ken Burton and his nephew, and how they died. She can’t stop imagining it. She keeps seeing people at the edge of her vision, keeps hearing them getting torn to pieces. She thinks _this is it, this is where I’m going to die,_ but it’s less of a thought and more of a feeling, heavy and cold like drowning.

The music’s too loud. Jem pulls the headphones off, and some of her hair gets caught in them on the way down. The rhythmic thudding of the train sounds strange and quiet, and it’s almost hard to hear under the sound of her own breathing, harsh and full of edges. It’s weird – it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from her at all.

 

By the time the train pulls in at the station, the car has filled up with passengers, and Jem is keeping her breathing even. She’s holding on to herself with her fingernails, but she doesn’t look it, and that has to count for something. It’s got to be enough.

She gets off the train and walks through the station area without looking back. There are too many people around, and they keep bumping into her, brushing past her like ghostly, grasping hands. The sky outside is iron grey and relentless like a fist. She wraps her jacket tighter around herself. The therapist’s office is just across the road, and the sign over the bright blue door says “THE MATHESON CLINIC” in big, blocky letters. At least it’s not a long walk.

 

The clinic waiting room has carpeted floors and framed photographs of the countryside on all four walls, and everything, even the receptionist, is softly beige. She smiles at Jem and tells her to sit down and wait. Jem sits down on the soft, beige couch and waits, staring at the gossip mags on the coffee table in front of her. It feels like she’s going to be waiting here forever. She could’ve taken a later train, but there are only two options when taking a train from Roarton to the city – too early and too late. It’s probably better to be early. Gives her some time to … prepare, maybe. Steel herself.

She tries to remember what it felt like, being _sure_. Because it was shit, it was really, really shit, but you could keep the rotters at bay if you shot straight enough, and it was hard but it wasn’t _complicated_. She remembers pulling the trigger, tries to remember how _good_ it felt when her aim was true and the bullets sprayed black blood across the walls, how fucking satisfying it had been to watch them burn, afterwards, how the smoke rising from a pyre of rotters always felt like a release.

It’s a bit like missing a stair. Because it changed things, when they realised they could get the dead back. It changed things when scientists invented neurotriptyline, it changed things when rotters became _partially deceased syndrome sufferers_ , and it changed things when the monsters came back home and were _human_. She looks back and remembers pulling the trigger, remembers lodging bullets into brain matter, and the satisfaction she’d felt hangs over her like a ghost, but she can’t _feel_ it; all that’s left is a dizzying, hollow sickness and the knowledge that they were _people_ , they were people and if she hadn’t –

“Are you okay?” the receptionist asks, kneeling next to her and looking like she’s not sure if she should call for help.

“I’m fine,” Jem says. She doesn’t trust herself to say anything else.

 

Doctor Brooks is tall and dark and wearing a bright green cardigan. It’s the cardigan that does it, for some reason. Maybe it’s the sharp break from all the beige, but everything is suddenly a little bit less suffocating.

“Hello, Jemima,” Doctor Brooks says. She is smiling. She has a nice smile. “Did you have any problems getting here?”

-

Phil hasn’t been back at the grave for over a week. He keeps meaning to, but there’s always something coming up, like fixing the toaster or doing the laundry or washing bits of dried egg off of the front door. There’s a thousand small things that need doing all at once. His hands are full, and he hasn’t really sat down for too long at a time since the funeral. He can’t, not when all these things need fixing. He doesn’t have a place in the council anymore, he’s not going to be able to get into politics when people know … when people _know_ , but that’s okay, there are a lot of things he needs to do and he doesn’t have a problem making himself useful. He cleans the house. He makes mum breakfast before she leaves for work, and tea for when she comes back home. He stays indoors.

The Friday two weeks after the funeral, mum gives him a look while they’re having tea. It’s the look she gives him when she’s worried. Philip eats faster. If he finishes before she can work her way up to asking, he might be able to avoid it altogether. Mum puts her cutlery down.

“Philip,” she says, and her voice is heavy with concern, “have you been outside at all this week?”

“Yes,” Philip says. It’s true.

Mum frowns. “For anything other than taking in the paper and going to the shop?”

“Yes,” Philip says, and it’s technically true, “mum – ”

“Was it for anything other than washing the egg off the door?” mum says. “Because that doesn’t count, you know.”

“ _Mum_ ,” Philip says. He puts his cutlery down, too.

“I’m worried about you, Philip.” Mum puts her plate down on the table. “You can’t hide from the world forever.”

“I’m not _hiding_ ,” Philip says, as imposingly as he can. “There’s just a lot of stuff that’s overdue for a fixing.”

Unfortunately, mum is impervious to his attempts at being imposing.

“You’re running yourself ragged over details, Philip,” she says, “it’s not healthy.”

“ _Mum_ – ”

Mum sighs. The light from the television hits her in bursts, and it makes the shadows under her eyes look bigger and smaller and bigger again. Philip puts his plate down on the table and swallows. He keeps forgetting that he’s not the only one who’s tired.

“Why don’t you join me for work tomorrow?” mum asks, and her voice is kind, but it leaves no room for argument. She’s impervious to his attempts at being imposing, but part of the reason why is that she’s a lot better at it than he is.

“I’m not qualified,” Philip says to the couch cushions. He expects her to argue, but she doesn’t.

“To be honest,” she says instead, “I don’t think anyone is.”

 

He waits until mum goes to bed, and then he waits some more, staring at the television without really seeing it. It’s dark outside. Mum wants him up early tomorrow. He should go to bed.

He gets up, and turns the television off. He turns off all the lights. He puts on his shoes and a jacket, and he goes outside.

 

It feels weird to leave the house. _He_ feels weird. Not quite himself. Philip walks down the street and tries to pretend he doesn’t know where he’s going. The grass on the side of the road shines with rime in the sunset yellow of the streetlights. His ears are cold. Everything smells sharp and smoky, like frost damage. His footsteps are the only sound around, and they echo heavily through the night air.

He’s at the graveyard in no time at all. He doesn’t want to, but his feet keep walking. He should have brought a flower. He should have brought _something_. He should have come back sooner.

And then he is at her grave. It looks different in the moonlight, like there is something missing. He bends down and touches the ground in front of it.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. His hand blurs in front of him, and he has to close his eyes. “I should have come sooner.”

It’s very quiet. The lack of sound scrapes across his skin and leaves him raw. He blinks up at the sky, and the tears fall hot on his cheeks.

“I – I miss you.” He forces himself to say it out loud. This means something. This has to mean something. “I miss you so much.”

He tries to think that she can hear him. That it’s not just him, on his knees in the middle of the night, talking to himself.

“They’re giving Miss Martin a trial,” he says, to fill the silence, “I thought you might want to …”

He stops mid-sentence. There are flowers on the grave, coated in frost and slowly dying, but there’s one thing missing. Philip stares at the spot where it should be.

“Where’s your tiger?”


End file.
